Review: Watchmen

For his third motion picture, director Zack Snyder has returned to a
formula that’s served him very well: snatch a well-established event
in geek culture, slather it in photographic gloss, and call it a
"tribute." Through a remake of "Dawn of the Dead" and a photocopy
interpretation of "300," Snyder has found his niche seizing the work
of others and shaping it into crude, chest-puffing cinema, intended to
rile the senses and play to undemanding appetites. With the
illustrious graphic novel "Watchmen," (IMDb listing) Snyder is forced to wield his
adaptation sword carefully, for a single flawed stroke is sure to
topple the entire endeavor. I give Snyder credit for his tenacious
reverence here, but "Watchmen" is an unimaginative attempt to
recapture lightning in a bottle, ultimately shadowing a literary
franchise that was better left on the page.

The year is 1985 and Richard M. Nixon holds firm as the U.S. president
while the superpowers of the world race toward an assured nuclear
holocaust. The time has passed for costumed crime fighters, with
vigilante Rorschach/Walter Kovacs (Jackie Earle Haley), frustrated
legacies Silk Spectre II/Laurie Juspeczyk (Malin Akerman) and Nite Owl
II/Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), genius industrialist
Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), and glowing blue deity Doctor
Manhattan/Jonathan Osterman (Billy Crudup) forced into retirement and
exile while the world they once chose to protect falls apart around
them. When maniac The Comedian/Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is
brutally murdered, the group is stunned, pushing Rorschach into
investigative mode to understand why someone has targeted "Masks" for
assassination. Digging further into the blood-smeared conspiracy, the
group learns to confront their once-heroic identities and ominous
end-of-times reality, while the seedy criminal trail leads from The
Comedian’s corpse to an exacting force of power from the most
unexpected origin.

"Watchmen" is perhaps the most holy of comic book property. Created by
Alan Moore (who took his name off this movie) and Dave Gibbons, the
expansive saga of the costumed outsiders gripped readers for 12 issues
throughout 1986 and 1987, challenging the sleepy state of the
superhero with a multifaceted tale of battered morality and cold war
concern. It was a classic yarn that redefined and popularized the
potential density of the ink and paint industry, giving birth to the
vast graphic novel genre we know today. Once thought unfilmable,
"Watchmen" has managed to climb out from the charred remains of
fallible Hollywood plans to make a sizable dent on the big screen. The
result is an elusive creation that holds so much respect for the
source material, it actually suffers from unbearable claustrophobia as
it kicks and broods its way to mediocrity.

I won’t proclaim "Watchmen" to be an intolerable motion picture, just
an unnecessary one. Holding to the perhaps unpopular belief that some
literature doesn’t require a cinematic counterpart, "Watchmen" was an
accomplishment reserved for the ambitious pages of the comic run,
where sprawling themes, complicated character study, and diverse
apocalyptic visions benefitted from a patience that could only emerge
from serial storytelling. Moore and Gibbons were bringing something
subversive to the milieu and tracking real-world fears, while holding
to an atypically lacerating overview of characters at war with
themselves and each other. Try as he might, Zack Snyder simply doesn’t
have the directorial sophistication to coax "Watchmen" into an
elevating, provocative experience. Instead, he traces, and not
convincingly.

Much like "300," Snyder uses the source material as his template, not
his inspiration; he endeavors to reconstruct the original handle of
the book by adhering to recognized visuals and famous frames, turning
"Watchmen" into a motion comic book over a breathable adaptation. By
sticking like glue to the Moore and Gibbons universe, the film is sure
to tickle the fanbase with its cornucopia of references, slavish
staging, and iconic poses ripped straight from the page, but where
does that leave the layman? Snyder doesn’t care. "Watchman" is
episodic by nature, which makes for a trying film, constantly ramping
up and down in pace while it sorts out a plethora of backstory the
novel spent a luxurious amount of time gracefully constructing. The
spastic expositional effect is jarring and frustrating, and while I
don’t begrudge the uber-fan his or her golden opportunity to see these
characters in motion after decades of waiting, the execution here is
muddy and far too condensed to make sense to anyone sinful enough to
stand outside of the treehouse.

With his addiction to glossy slo-mo and spurting body blows (executed
without irony), Snyder certainly sells the pants off the violence in
"Watchmen," making brute motivations easy to discern even to those
only halfway interested. Step an inch outside of the primary colors,
and the gravitas is gone, lost to a script that fails to pack an
insane amount of nuance into a crowded 160-minute-long running time.
Rorschach’s hard-boiled, byzantine dementia is simplified to
crowd-pleasing splatters of aggression, set loose within a cardboard
New York cityscape of backyard Kubrickian limitation; Nite Owl II’s
internal emasculation presses too hard on the bespectacled nerd
button, making the engaging transition between impotent domestic and
liberated superhero personalities far-fetched compared to the rest of
the group; Silk Spectre II’s heartache is reduced to complaining and
pouting; Doctor Manhattan’s philosophical detachment and Red Planet
seclusion is handed only a rudimentary appreciation, with more
attention paid to his transportive powers (and exposed genitalia) than
his callous soul; The Comedian is turned into a simplistic
cigar-chomping, baby killing brute with little tangible dimension; and
Ozymandias is shifted from an all-powerful narrative linchpin to a
sleepy, nonspecific aggressor.

With the exception of Goode and his perplexing Barbara Walters accent,
along with Morgan and his cringing inability to make the stilted
dialogue his own, "Watchmen" is successfully acted. In fact, Haley’s
astonishing, acidic work as Rorschach is a career-best effort, easily
stealing the film away from the rest of the masks with his gritted
teeth revulsion. However, thespian stiffness remains a constant source
of irritation within the feature; the cast seems more aware of their
windblown outward appearance than the critical solemnity of the moment
and Snyder offers little in the way of guidance, favoring slick visual
slide over grit, with cinematographic gimmicks swallowing the bruised
core of the material with every passing minute.

There’s more to be said about Snyder’s ineffective vision, which
extends to some brutally awkward period soundtrack selections, an
absurd "Red Shoe Diaries" staging of a limber sexual tryst between
Laurie and Dan on his all-purpose ship Archie (an event that receives
more screentime than the scope of Ozymandias’s personality), and his
infuriating insistence that the audience fill in the plot gaps
themselves. While Snyder’s visual mastery is open for debate (much of
"Watchmen" looks like a Nike commercial), his storytelling instincts
remain a complete mess, with the closing showdown in Antarctica shorn
of its otherworldly alarm and reimagined as something unacceptably
conventional, perhaps ultimately unworthy of all the fuss that
precedes it.

After 2+ hours observing "Watchmen" stumble over its own feet in a
futile endeavor to communicate a broad sweep of
satire/pathos/heartbreak with little in the way of artistic breathing
room, I was pining for the original book and its sheer sullen antihero
elegance. This is not a delectable mythos that needed a shiny new
package for the world to enjoy, and especially not one that takes more
pride in the art of the slow motion punch over an exhilarating
sensation of doom.

Na… as soon as i saw The SWAT Team attacked by a Spraybottle used by the masked man torching them, i stopped watching the movie.

because:

* Action scenes doesn´t relate alot that they are SuperHeroes (Lack of Imagination) i guess. Like using a spray bottle is the best Imagination stunt they could get up to -lol- oh don´t get me wrong! they even did it in SLOW MO-TION -lol- ! -lol- like thats a superhero move -lol- a teenager has more action fantasy than you my friend!